Perhaps only Al Green could find a way to mention Jimi Hendrix and the late Pope John Paul II in the same breath.

“You have to pay attention to Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Mahalia Jackson, Pope John Paul II,” Green said recently, showing his affection for the delightful non sequitur. “Now the pope, that’s a man who’s incredible. Any man who is giving Mass and has had surgery on his throat but is still out there trying – to me, that was so, so touching.”

Talking to Green, who plays the Paramount Theatre on Saturday, is not unlike hearing him sing: It’s artful, free-form improvisation that swoops and soars and challenges the listener.

Green’s active mind is all over the place, making connections from decades as one of our finest soul singers to his more recent stint in the pulpit of his Memphis, Tenn., church. He’s a hard man to keep up with.

It makes for an excellent – if random and at times perplexing – interview. Here are five conversation points from our last talk with The Reverend a few weeks ago.

On his “children:” “Mark J., Nelly, all of them, they are kids, and they found this new thing – rap, which isn’t really that new – so let’s let them enjoy their fun. We had our fun, and this is theirs.”

On an airline losing his bag and, more important, his suit before a big corporate show: “Not long ago, I was at an airport – I had flown in to play a Yamaha convention – when I realized the airline had lost my suit.

“So what I wore onstage later that night was a pair of jogging pants and a Yamaha T-shirt, and I went out there and said, ‘They lost my suit,’ and everybody stood up and applauded. And it made sense, because the song doesn’t come from the suit – it comes from the heart.”

On balancing his ministry, the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, with his still-blooming music career: “I don’t have to balance it. The big man, he’s the one balancing it. He made me reverend – there’s nowhere I can go where people don’t call me Rev. Al Green. I went to East Berlin when they were still separated, and they called me Rev. Al Green.”

On singing certain hit songs, then not singing them, and then singing them again: “I tell people, ‘We’re going to come up there and sing love and happiness, because God is love.’ Because I have an understanding now, whereas at first I didn’t know what was going on. I stopped singing a lot of those songs for six to eight years, but then I got all that straightened out after being left out in the mountains for 14 to 21 days without food and only water.

“I got it straightened out, because I was sitting by a stream, and he said, ‘Sing your songs. They’re beautiful songs. They make people stay together. They make people solve their differences. They make people happy, they bring them joy. They’re about life. Everything can’t be all about one day – I made all the days.’ And I’m sitting there, ‘You made all the days? Who is this here talking to me?”‘

On the benefits of divine intervention – and the whole food-but-no-water thing: “The people who were telling me that, ‘You can’t sing those songs,’ they love to be overly religious, they love to be holier than thou – but their parents got here on the same notion that my music brings.

“When I wouldn’t sing ‘Love and Happiness,’ ‘Let’s Stay Together’ and other songs, I wouldn’t sing any of the secular, as you call it, music. At the close of that time, I met Audrey Williams, Hank Williams’ wife, and she said, ‘You need to put some country music in here and see what you can do with it,’ and she played ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ and asked me to sing some country.

“She said I needed to get my head straight, and so she rented this chalet in the mountains and she said, ‘Call me when you need me,’ and she left. ‘But what am I supposed to do here?’ I thought. So I went back into the house, I open the refrigerator, and there were only two cases of water. Maybe she forgot to bring food, maybe she didn’t forget. … But that’s when all that stuff started happening.”

Al Green

Ricardo Baca is the editor of The Cannabist. After 12 years as The Denver Post's music critic and a couple more as the paper's entertainment editor, he was tapped to become The Post's first ever marijuana editor and create The Cannabist in late-2013. Baca also founded music blog Reverb and co-founded music festival The UMS.